Demographic Research

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the mortality impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on US-born and foreign-born populations by race and Hispanic origin in the United States in 2020. METHODS: Death records from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data from CDC WONDER were used to estimate (1) age-standardized all-cause and cause-specific mortality at ages 25+, 25-64, and 65+ in 2017-2019 and 2020 by nativity, race, Hispanic origin, and sex; (2) changes in mortality between these two periods; and (3) the cause-specific contributions to these changes...

BACKGROUND: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Hispanic population resulted in the almost complete elimination of the long-standing Hispanic mortality advantage relative to the non-Hispanic White population. However, it is unknown how COVID-19 mortality affected the diverse Hispanic subpopulations. OBJECTIVE: We estimate life expectancy at birth in 2019 and 2020 by select Hispanic country/region of origin and explore how changes in age-specific all-cause and COVID-19 mortality affected changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 for each group...

BACKGROUND: Smoking is a leading cause of premature death across contemporary developed nations, but few longitudinal individual-level studies have examined the long-term health consequences of exposure to smoking. OBJECTIVE: We examine the effect of fetal and infant exposure to exogenous variation in smoking, brought about by state-level cigarette taxation, on adulthood and old-age mortality (ages 55-73) among cohorts of boys born in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s...

OBJECTIVE: To compare fertility in India to both low-to-middle-income and high-income countries (LMICs and HICs) and describe the patterns that have accompanied India's transition to low fertility. METHODS: We use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the United Nations (UN), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to observe factors associated with fertility decline in 36 Indian states and 76 countries. RESULTS: Although fertility in India has declined to levels similar to HICs, women's entry into marriage and initiation of childbearing are more in line with patterns found in LMICs...

BACKGROUND: The increasing prevalence of frailty in aging populations represents a major social and public health challenge which warrants a better understanding of the contribution of frailty to the morbid process. OBJECTIVE: To examine frailty-related mortality as reported on the death certificate in France, Italy, Spain and the United States in 2017. METHODS: We identify frailty at death for the population aged 50 years and over in France, Italy, Spain and the United States...

BACKGROUND: While the use of standard errors and confidence intervals is common in regression-based studies in the population sciences, it is far less common in studies using formal demographic measures and methods, including demographic decompositions. OBJECTIVE: This article describes and provides explicit instructions for using four different approaches for computing standard errors for complex demographic estimators. METHODS: Standard errors for Arriaga's decomposition of life expectancy differences are computed using the delta method, the Poisson bootstrap, the binomial bootstrap, and the Monte Carlo approaches...

BACKGROUND: Life expectancy is a pure measure of the mortality conditions faced by a population, unaffected by that population's age structure. The numerical value of life expectancy also has an intuitive interpretation, conditional on some assumptions, as the expected age at death of an average newborn. This intuitive interpretation gives life expectancy a broad appeal. Changes in life expectancy are also routinely used to assess mortality trends. Interpreting these changes is not straightforward as the assumptions underpinning the intuitive interpretation of life expectancy are no longer valid...

BACKGROUND: A classic debate concerns whether absolute or relative income is more salient. Absolute values resources as constant across time and place while relative contextualizes one's hierarchical location in the distribution of a time and place. OBJECTIVE: This study investigates specifically whether absolute income or relative income matters more for health and well-being. METHODS: We exploit within-person, within-age, and within-time variation with higher-quality income measures and multiple health and well-being outcomes in the United States...

BACKGROUND: The role of smoking in racial disparities in mortality and life expectancy in the United States has been examined previously, but up-to-date estimates are generally unavailable, even though smoking prevalence has declined in recent decades. OBJECTIVE: We estimate the contribution of smoking-attributable mortality to observed differences in mortality and life expectancy for US African-American and white adults from 2000-2019. METHODS: The indirect Preston-Glei-Wilmoth method was used with national vital statistics and population data and nationally representative never-smoker lung cancer death rates to estimate the smoking-attributable fraction (SAF) of deaths in the United States by sex-race group from 2000-2019...

BACKGROUND: Longitudinal data available for studying fertility in the United States are not representative at the state level, limiting analyses of subnational variation in US fertility. The US Census Bureau makes available restricted data that may be used for measuring fertility, but the data have not previously been described for a scholarly audience or used for fertility research. OBJECTIVE: This paper describes and analyzes restricted-use administrative birth data available through the Census Numident for nearly all US births for more than the last century...

BACKGROUND: Latin America has high rates of single motherhood and intergenerational coresidence, resulting in children experiencing changes in household composition - particularly with respect to fathers and grandparents. In other contexts, such changes have been shown to influence educational outcomes. OBJECTIVE: To test if the presence of grandparents and fathers in the household are differentially associated with educational outcomes during schooling years in Peru...

BACKGROUND: Wilson (1987) argued that race differences in the frequency of marriage from the 1960s to the 1980s resulted from a shortage of marriageable men in the Black community. A large literature used spatially defined measures of male marriageability to predict marriage rates of women. These studies concluded that the availability of marriageable men can explain only a fraction of race differences in marriage. I argue that this finding may reflect errors in the measurement of the availability of marriageable spouses...

BACKGROUND: There has been little systematic research on the mortality impact of COVID-19 in the Native American population. OBJECTIVE: We provide estimates of loss of life expectancy in 2020 and 2021 relative to 2019 for the Native American population. METHODS: We use data on age-specific all-cause mortality rates from CDC WONDER and the 2019 life table recently released by the National Vital Statistics System for Native Americans to calculate life tables for the Native American population in 2020 and 2021 and to obtain estimates of life expectancy reductions during the COVID-19 pandemic...

BACKGROUND: Contacts with the criminal legal system have consequences for a host of outcomes. Still, early life age patterns of system involvement remain to be better understood. OBJECTIVE: We estimate cumulative risks of arrest, probation, and incarceration from childhood through early adulthood and assess disparities by race/ethnicity, gender, and parental education. METHODS: Data come from the Transition to Adulthood Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (n = 2,736)...

BACKGROUND: While recent decades have seen gradual convergence in ethno-racial disparities in completed fertility in the United States, differences in the age pattern of first births remain. The role of nativity has not been fully understood. OBJECTIVE: This paper examines how first births vary by nativity, and how this variation contributes to more significant racial and ethnic differentials. METHODS: Using data from the National Survey of Family Growth (1997-2017), we jointly estimate the correlates of the timing of first births and childlessness...

BACKGROUND: The number of adults living with limitations in daily activities in the United States is large, and projected to increase. Families, which are becoming more complex, are critical to the wellbeing of this population. OBJECTIVE: We present national estimates of the size and composition of kin networks for adults with activity limitations. METHODS: We use the 2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics to assess kin relationships of adults aged 40 and older with an activity limitation...

BACKGROUND: As many as one-in-three unintended births occur in Africa. These births have the potential to adversely impact women's health, but data and design limitations have complicated efforts to understand their consequences. Moreover, there is growing evidence that women often feel happy about an unintended pregnancy and this heterogeneity may be important for identifying the births that are - and those that are not - harmful to women's health. OBJECTIVE: To assess whether having an unintended birth precipitates health declines for young women in a high-fertility, high-morbidity context, and whether women's emotional reaction to the pregnancy foreshadows the consequences of the resulting birth...

BACKGROUND: Recent data suggest that overall divorce rates in the United States have been declining since the 1980s, while research examining marriages formed prior to 2004 suggests that divorce rates historically have not declined equally across the socioeconomic spectrum. Understanding recent differentials by education helps explore growing inequality over time given the well-documented negative consequences of divorce for women. OBJECTIVE: This study examines marital dissolution and divorce rates in the new millennium to understand trends by marital cohort and educational attainment...

BACKGROUND: Advancing efforts to unpack the complex relationship between marital dissolutions and health outcomes increasingly requires assessing the marital histories and health of individuals who have lived long enough to experience divorce or widowhood ‒ or even multiples of each ‒ and measurable changes in health. OBJECTIVE: To explore this line of inquiry, we chose a sample from rural Malawi where a high prevalence of marital dissolutions and remarrying exists, as an ideal theoretical foil to the predominant literature found in high-income countries (HICs)...

BACKGROUND: Estimates of under-5 mortality (U5M) for sub-Saharan African populations often rely heavily on full birth histories (FBHs) collected in surveys and model age patterns of mortality calibrated against vital statistics from other populations. Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSSs) are alternate sources of population-based data in much of sub-Saharan Africa, which are less formally utilized in estimation. OBJECTIVE: In this study we compare the age pattern of U5M in different African data sources (HDSSs, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)), and contrast these with the historical record as summarized in the Human Mortality Database and model age patterns...